Mayport Stars

2015.01.18

Day Two Hundred and Eleven. It was 2 days away from a new moon, so I decided to go out and try some ultra-long single-exposure star trails. My favourite star trails image was an 8 minute exposure, so my goal for the evening was a 16 minute exposure!

The lack of moonlight made the usual nighttime shooting problems even worse. There was literally nothing to focus on and modern lenses don't have a hard stop at infinity (thank you autofocus), so it took some hunting to focus the image. 5 test shots later, I had the focus locked in and 3 tests shots after that, I had the high ISO equivalent of a proper exposure dialed in. All that was left was to wait for the 16 minute exposure and 16 minutes of long exposure noise reduction. If you've read my gear guide, this situation is exactly why I recommend carrying a hiking chair when doing long exposure. After actuating the shutter, I had nothing to do but sit for 32 minutes waiting to see how the final exposure came out!

I was a little annoyed by the boat that floated into the frame (light streak in the bottom right half of the image), but if you ignore that, I think this came out just about perfectly :)